Warning Labels For AI-Generated Text
Maybe we should just start sticking icons on this stuff
So, there’s a ton of AI-generated text in our lives.
Back in January, a Fishbowl survey of 4,500 professionals found that 30% were using ChatGPT at work; ten months on, I’d imagine that number could be higher. Perhaps a fifth to a third of college students are using it, depending on whether these surveys hold water. Newsguard is finding more and more content-mill websites filled with AI-generated text (i.e. “Can lemon cure skin allergy?”); one site they tracked pushed out 1,200 articles a day. I’ve seen quite a few Medium comments on my posts that carry the dusty existential odor of a large language model. (Typically, they’ll just blandly summarize what my post says, in a short paragraph, and add no more; their author has a Medium account filled with equally bland posts covering a seemingly random selection of subjects.)
That’s only the visible part of the AI iceberg, mind you! Beneath the surface, plenty of folks using ChatGPT or other large-language models as writing aids — i.e. to generate first draft of an email, a presentation, a post, which they’ll use as inspiration or a template for their own writing.
So this is the world we’re in now!
